/Exhibition/
This Candy Has Teeth
Role: Curator
Artists: Shengjie Jiang, Weican Wang, Jiaqi Mao, Yukun (Chloe) Ba, Cindy Zhaoyue Chen
Time: 2026/8/25-2026/9/1
Address: 526 West 26th Street, Suite 414, New York, NY 10001
Childhood is often retold through images of softness, sweetness, and brightness. Candy, toys, stuffed animals, pastries, stages, and games form a familiar visual language through which childhood experiences are recognized and reconstructed. As these objects are repeatedly touched, enlarged, and rearranged in memory, however, their textures begin to change. Sugar coatings harden, seams emerge from toys, and supportive frames, cracks, and other elements that resist easy interpretation gradually appear beneath soft surfaces.
This Candy Has Teeth begins with a moment of sensory misalignment: something that appears sweet and yielding reveals an unexpected hardness when bitten. The sweetness remains, yet the body is forced to pause and reconsider the acts of chewing, swallowing, and remembering. Through this physical interruption, the exhibition asks how objects from childhood can simultaneously contain intimacy and unfamiliarity, comfort and anxiety, as well as the harder structures temporarily concealed by their playful or endearing appearances.
Ceramic shells, flowing surfaces, fur, frosting, canvas, and metal frameworks create shifting relationships between interior and exterior. Softness depends upon structures that allow it to hold its shape, while sweetness is always attached to specific materials, weights, and boundaries. As surfaces melt, crack, or turn themselves inside out, the emotions stored within these objects begin to emerge: unspoken fears, attachments to companionship, the desire for control within play, and the subtle pain that accompanies growing up.
Across painting, sculpture, installation, and materially driven practices, the exhibition approaches childhood as a sensory experience that continues to act upon the present. Though its original moments may have passed, childhood returns through shape, color, texture, and smell. Objects once held in the hand, placed beside the bed, hidden inside a drawer, or dissolved on the tongue acquire new weight and hardness through time.
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